The present invention relates generally to integrated circuits, and more particularly to an integrated circuit graphics display system.
Graphics display systems are typically used in television control electronics, such as set top boxes, integrated digital TVs, and home network computers. Graphics display systems typically include a display engine that may perform display functions. The display engine is the part of the graphics display system that receives display pixel data from any combination of locally attached video and graphics input ports, processes the data in some way, and produces final display pixels as output.
This application includes references to both graphics and video, which reflects in certain ways the structure of the hardware itself. This split does not, however, imply the existence of any fundamental difference between graphics and video, and in fact much of the functionality is common to both. Graphics as used herein may include graphics, text and video.
The present invention provides an apparatus and method for processing graphics images for display. The method includes the steps of organizing the graphics images into windows in which the graphics images appear on the screen, obtaining data that describes the windows, sorting the data according to the depth of the window on the display, transferring graphics images from memory, and blending the graphics images using alpha values associated with the graphics images.